Major news article: "Polyamory: Three’s (or four’s, or five’s) company"

The Globe and Mail (Canada)

The Showtime reality show Polyamory brings unconventional choices into the spotlight.

Canada's largest national newspaper (circulation 1 million, often called Canada's newspaper of record) is out this morning with a serious, very lengthy, factual report on the polyamory movement in North America.

Polyamory: Three’s (or four’s, or five’s) company

By Jeff Fraser

When the new Canadian census figures were released this week, there was a lot of talk about the rise in single-person households, as well as same-sex pairings and unmarried couples with children. But another variety of domestic arrangement continues to fly below the radar of demographics: those that involve more than two adult romantic partners.

While statistics are hard to come by, the lifestyle – which many of its practitioners call polyamory – does not go totally unnoticed, for better or worse.

A three-way civic union between a man and two women sparked outrage in Brazil in August.... U.S. conservatives such as Rick Santorum and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia have included multiple marriage as one of the inevitable moral perversions that would follow legalizing gay marriage.... 

But a sunnier vision was aired this summer on the U.S. Showtime cable station’s series Polyamory: Married and Dating, which Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak called “trashy, profound, and the best reality show on TV.”

...The Showtime series marks a step toward the mainstream for polyamory – and a new spin to the debate over whether a family comprises exactly one man and one woman.

The show’s creator and executive producer is Natalia Garcia from Montreal. “I made this show for monogamous, mainstream people who are in traditional relationships, who don’t know they have an option, who feel like they’re stuck – or they’re cheating secretly or they’re about to break up,” she says. “Why is it that we can only marry one person if we love multiple people? Who decided that?”

For the uninitiated, polyamory (also known as ethical non-monogamy) is the current incarnation of a subculture whose roots extend from 19th-century utopian communes to 1960s “free love,” 1970s “swinging” lifestyles and open marriages and 1990s fetish communities. In contrast to swinging, however, polyamory emphasizes transparency and emotional commitment to all romantic and sexual partners, and partners in a “poly” family may cohabit or raise children.

The practice has been elaborated by a growing library of self-help books with titles such as Opening Up and The Ethical Slut and endorsed by public figures such as sex columnist Dan Savage and actress Tilda Swinton.

The reporter dug up a fair amount of research on the nature of today's poly community:

...Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist who runs Sheff Consulting Group in Atlanta, has studied polyamorous families extensively since the mid-1990s.

She has found that women share sexual power more equally with men in polyamorous relationships than in polygamous ones – partly because women are generally more selective of sexual partners, and tend to find new ones more easily, which gives them leverage.

Earlier this year, an Internet survey of 1,100 polyamorists conducted by Melissa Mitchell at Simon Fraser University – the largest academic survey of polyamorists to date – found that majority of poly individuals (64 per cent) have two partners, with 61 per cent of the women identifying their two closest partners as both men and 86 per cent of men identifying their two closest partners as both women.

The majority of the women in the sample identified as bisexual (68 per cent), while bisexual men are less frequent (39 per cent) and exclusive homosexuals are rare (3.9 per cent for women and 2.9 per cent for men).

The study found that on average, polyamorists spend more time with and feel more committed to their primary partners than their secondary partners, though they may find secondary partners better satisfy their sexual needs. Seventy per cent of the sample live with their closest partner and 47 per cent are married to him/her. The average relationship length was nine years for closest partners and 2.5 years for second-closest partners.

The researchers note that because the survey is self-selected, it doesn’t provide a representative sample, but Dr. Sheff says the SFU results line up with those of other studies, such as the 71 focus interviews she conducted with Midwestern and Californian polyamorists from 1996 to 2009.

The article is careful to draw the distinction, sometimes missed by the careless, between polyamory and simply dating around:

Dr. Sheff says that despite the pronounced importance of gender equality to polyamorists, it’s not unusual for men to be drawn to it because they believe that it will lead to easy sex or sex with multiple women.

But philanderers and pickup artists have a difficult time meeting the emotional demands of a polyamorous lifestyle and are eventually turned off – or ostracized – by the community.

“Ongoing poly relationships can be enough of a challenge, and require so much communication, that there is often less sex than talking,” Dr. Sheff said. “If the men come in thinking, ‘This is going to be a big free-for-all,’ and they’re not willing to put in the effort to maintaining the relationship part of it, they get a bad reputation.”

And the writer, correctly, is careful to describe how it's not all a bed of roses:

Polyamory: Married and Dating makes it clear that the advantages of open relationships come at a price: While the members of the cast have a lot of sex, they spend much more time deconstructing their emotions and debating each other’s rights and responsibilities.

What seem like common marital hiccups – for example, when Jen Gold gets angry that her husband, Tahl Gruer, has invited his ex to a party – spawn deep, emotional arguments.

Ms. Garcia, the producer, says she never wanted to give the impression that polyamorous families are perfect. “Truthfully, poly doesn't work for everyone, the way monogamy doesn't work for everyone,” she says. "To claim that polyamorous families don't argue and everything is perfect would be a lie."

On polyamorist websites such as Modern Poly and Poly in the Media [YAY!! But too bad he screwed up our name; it's Polyamory in the News. Update: the writer has corrected it in the online version.], reactions have been mixed – some fear that the show is exploitative and oversexualized, while others are just happy to have representation on TV.

...Kamala Devi, one of the show’s protagonists, is the first to admit that her “pod,” which includes husband Michael McClure and married couple Jen and Tahl, as well as a periphery of other lovers, is atypical for poly families. “I’m not representative of what polyamory looks like. I’ve been doing it for 15 years, I have a lot of lovers, and my life is devoted to it,” she says.

“There are lots of different ways of doing poly – not everyone’s married, and not everyone’s living together. I look at my life as an example of the extreme, as opposed to a real representation of what poly looks like in America.”

More research, on race and class:

In other senses, however, the cast of Polyamory is typical of poly culture. According to a growing body of research, the community is dominated by white professionals and college students. Ninety per cent of the respondents to Ms. Mitchell’s study identified as Caucasian, and 94.5 per cent had some college education.

Of Dr. Sheff’s interview subjects, 89 per cent were white, 74 per cent were in professional jobs and 67 per cent had at least a bachelor’s degree.

A 2011 literature survey by Dr. Sheff and Corie Hammers, which compiled racial and class data on polyamorists and related groups from 36 independent studies, confirmed that sexual minorities are heavily weighted toward upper-middle-class whites.

It makes sense, Dr. Sheff says: People who face poverty or racism often cannot afford to take the risks associated with defying social norms, which could lead to losing their jobs, homes or kids. Legal protection is particularly scarce for polys, which is less of a problem for those with the financial resources to hire lawyers.

Yet the authors of poly self-help literature tend to characterize it as a choice that depends primarily on conviction, hard work and personal courage rather than social status and financial security.

“It’s easy to cast as a personal choice if that’s all it seems to you, devoid of social and political context,” Dr. Sheff says. “But some people can’t ignore that context.”

And it ends on a very positive note:

Sheff says more public role models, like those provided by Polyamory: Married and Dating, may help to destigmatize polyamory and make it less risky.

Kamala Devi – a Latina woman of Jewish descent, and the only person of colour on the cast – says that many of the reactions to the show have expressed gratitude and relief. “I get letters from people in the Midwest who've been doing this for years in secret,” she says, “and they're like 'Finally, somebody out there is reassuring me that me and my husband and his girlfriends that we're not freaks.’”

She says she knows the feeling. “I spent most of my life stumbling around, trying to figure things out, because I didn't have any clear role models to show me how polyamory was done. If there was a show like this around when I came out, I would have saved myself a lot of headache, a lot of heartache.”

Read the whole article (online Sept. 21; print edition Sept. 22, 2012, page F6), and join the comments.

The writer, Jeff Fraser, is a master's student at the Ryerson University School of Journalism.

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Poly psychotherapy articlein a major newspaper

Philadelphia Inquirer

Poly activists, researchers, and therapists have long tried to get a foothold at mainstream academic and professional conferences. They achieved a milestone last Wednesday (May 9) with a well-attended panel at the convention of the American Psychiatric Association in Philadelphia. Ken Haslam, who was there, posted to the Polyamory Leadership Network about

...what was probably the first-ever formal discussion of polyamory at a psychiatry convention. William Slaughter (a psychiatrist from Harvard), Richard Sprott (a psychologist), and Eli Sheff (an academic sociologist) presented a wide variety of polyamory topics to a standing-room-only audience of psychiatrists. It would appear that polyamory has, to a very small extent, finally made it onto the screen of mainstream medicine.

That's Bill Slaughter at right. Here's the session listing in the program:

Polyamory (responsible non-monogamy), an emerging relationship orientation/presenting issue: Research and clinical information to improve care. William David Slaughter MD, Elisabeth Sheff, Ph.D. and Richard Sprott, Ph.D.

Here are Sprott's PowerPoint slides from his part of the presentation: "A Review of the Research on Polyamory."

One of the people attending the session was a medical reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the major local newspaper. She didn't hold out much hope at the time that she would get an article published. But in this morning's paper, here it is:

Experts in Philly describe mysteries of polyamory: When one lover isn’t enough

By Stacey Burling

You think a romantic relationship between two people is hard? Try polyamory.

A panel of experts at the American Psychiatric Association meeting in Philadelphia last week said that open relationships between more than two people can work, but it requires a lot of talk about rules, boundaries, and time spent with various lovers.

William Slaughter, a psychiatrist in Cambridge, Mass., who has been treating polyamorous patients for about five years, said they need to have very good communication skills and be especially good at “mentalizing” or understanding others’ emotional reactions. He and Richard Sprott, a psychologist at California State University East Bay, and Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist who recently left Georgia State University, talked about what to expect from polyamorous patients. Such patients often complain that they have to spend too much time educating their therapists, Slaughter said.

...The most common presentation, the panel said, is a couple that considers their relationship primary, while each may also have secondary relationships with other people. Sometimes all the relationships are considered equally important or all secondary.

Sheff said she knows of one group of seven, but that’s unusual. “When they get larger than quads, they’re a moresome,” she said.

...Sheff and Sprott believe polyamory is increasing. Sprott said younger generations are less insistent on monogamy than their parents. He cited research that found that 29 percent of lesbian couples, 29 percent of cohabiting straight couples, and 47 percent of gay couples are not monogamous.

...The panel said there is ongoing debate about whether polyamory is a choice or a sexual orientation. Some people float between monogamous and polyamorous relationships.

She and Sprott said the poly community tends to be white and well educated. About half say they are bisexual and 30 to 40 percent are into BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism), Sprott said. He said both the men and women tend to have unusually high testosterone levels and be extroverted and high in what psychologists call sensation-seeking.

Sheff has studied children in polyamorous families. In her small sample, the “kids tend to be in great shape.” These families often aren’t obvious to the mono world. They look like a couple whose good friends come over a lot or people who are good friends with their exes. Most are discreet about sex, so the kids aren’t confronted by it and neither are their friends.

Sheff said the children say they like having extra adults in their lives. There’s always someone to drive them somewhere or help with homework. “A number of them expressed pity for children who only have two parents,” she said.

The important point for therapists, she said, is that polyamorous families are “not definitionally pathological.” While they don’t follow conventional morals, they do establish clear ethical codes that emphasize honesty and treating others well.

...Slaughter said people in the poly community come to him for the same reasons as other patients. Some extra issues include secret affairs, coercion, grudging consent, the opening and closing of marriages, and fears about child custody. A particularly emotional time is when a couple decides to enter the poly community together, he said. They have to work out new boundaries. They ask: “How much time do you spend with me? How do I know you love me?”

Asked about sexually transmitted diseases, the panel said this issue is probably discussed in more detail in the polyamory community than among other groups. People may agree on complex sexual rules, including “fluid bonds” that spell out whom they’ll have sex with without condoms.

Read the whole article (May 14, 2012). In the print edition it was on the front page of the C section.

Regarding this bit — "patients often complain that they have to spend too much time educating their therapists" — print out and give your therapist in advance this excellent, professional booklet: What Psychology Professionals Should Know About Polyamory. It's produced under the auspices of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF). The paper copies of the first printing have all been distributed; a second edition is currently being edited and printed, funded by yours truly.

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Getting your poly group in local media

Two nice articles showed up in alternative city weeklies this week.

Yes, these matter. A surprising number of people still have never heard of the poly concept — especially accurately! — even among well-read folks I meet.

It can be easy to get your city newsweekly to run an article about your group. The trick? Just call and ask! This first story appeared in the Pittsburgh City Paper. It was written by one of their regular columnists who also podcasts:

Learning to negotiate consent and communicate well is central to poly relationships

By Jessie Sage

Jessie Sage
 

If thousands of hours of conversations as a phone sex operator have taught me one thing, it’s that for many folks, strict monogamy is tremendously stressful.

...A local group, Poly in Pittsburgh, is working to create a community that supports poly folks and to normalize polyamory as a practice. Morgan Hawkins, founder of Poly in Pittsburgh, described polyamory as simply “opening yourself up to the possibility of more than one loving relationship.” She tells me that not everyone practices polyamory the same way, adding, “the beauty of polyamory is the freedom you have to form relationships in a configuration that works for you and your partner(s).” ...

...When Poly in Pittsburgh started in August 2016, it was just a Facebook group with a dozen of her friends and former partners.... But soon those folks started adding their friends and partners, and now the Facebook group has 900 members. Active members not only participate in online discussions, but also meet for monthly socials and attend other events together. Hawkins describes the community as serving a really important function for poly folks.

“Like many other countercultures, it's comforting and validating to have a community where you don't feel like you have to defend yourself and your way of living and relating,” she says. ...

Read on (December 12, 2018).


● In the Sacramento News & Review, this one's about a local podcast by four polyfolks, again by one of the paper's regular writers:

Rolling in the hay together

The rising podcasters in Brown Chicken Brown Cow mix humor and body positivity when talking about sex

By Aaron Carnes

In a rhythm like ’70s porn music, Monkey and Miss Laura sing the words “Brown Chicken Brown Cow” when they get on-air. Childish jokes follow, and Laura announces to the internet that her colleague is blushing.

“Let’s bump up the blush meter to 2,” she says. Monkey (real name Sean Makiney) reddens easily. The highest he hit on the fictional meter was 32. ...

Today’s guests are Robert and Samantha, a polyamorous couple with two daughters, 8 and 10 years old. Laura asks: How did you tell your kids about having multiple romantic partners?

“It was more us explaining that we have a very open family, and we want to be open to anybody that we feel is important to us,” Samantha says. “It was fun to see how open and excited they were to have the conversation with us.”

The interview stays serious until Laura (who asked not to be named) poses a final question, as she does with every guest: What barnyard animal are you?

(Sean Makiney illustrations) 

“We are an inclusive show, and we believe in all types of barnyard animals, not just traditional, hetero-normative barnyard animals,” Laura prefaces. Robert says he’s a dolphin, and Samantha’s a kangaroo.

“You have a pouch and you can carry your two kids in there,” Laura says. “That is a great animal to be.” This cracks everyone up, including Robert and Samantha, who had just cautiously revealed their alternative lifestyle to the web.

In a year and a half, Brown Chicken Brown Cow has become one of Sacramento’s most popular podcasts. ... The podcast now regularly lands in the Top 100 of all podcasts on iTunes. That’s impressive considering that, according to an early 2018 Nielson report, there are more than 550,000 podcasts worldwide.

...The polyamory episodes were one of the podcasts’ monthly themes. With some topics, the hosts bring their own experience (they’re all polyamorous). Others they approach with naiveté. ...

The whole article (Dec. 13).


● And while we're at it, a good Open Relationships 101 just appeared in Prevention, an old-line commercial woo-woo promotion rag magazine heavy on health supplements. Eli Sheff got quoted a lot and, as always, she does us proud.

What to Know About Open Relationships Before You Even Think About Trying One

Psychologists explain how open relationships work, whether they’re healthy, and how to start the conversation.

By Cassie Shortsleeve

...“I generally let people tell me what they mean by ‘open relationship,’” says Elisabeth Sheff, PhD, one of a handful of global academic experts on polyamory, recognizing that the broader category of an "open relationship" is a consensually non-monogamous union.

How do open relationships work? Are there rules?
People usually enter open relationships to get more of their needs met — a relationship might have a sexual desire mismatch, for example — but every pair is different. ...

People in polyamorous relationships, for example, seek the emotional element. “They’re looking for love and a deeper ongoing relationship,” says Sheff, adding that polyamorous couples tend to emphasize communication and honesty. ...

Are open relationships healthy?
“Open relationship are as healthy as the people in them,” says Sheff. “Just like monogamous relationships, some of them are amazing, fantastic, life-affirming, and really wonderful. Others are abusive, horrible, and the worst thing that ever happened to someone.” ... How healthy a relationship is usually boils down to how it is handled — hopefully with love, integrity, and kindness to one another, Sheff says.

What to consider before entering an open relationship
First and foremost, think about how things might play out in the long run. “Don’t assume just because you want more sex that polyamory or an open relationship is for you,” says Sheff. “A lot of people get excited about the prospect of having multiple partners but then get upset when the tables are turned and their partners have other partners.”

...Also, your initial relationship must be healthy to begin with, says Sheff. “Consensual non-monogamy is kind of like a stress test or a jetpack — whichever way the relationship is headed, it just really zooms it in that direction.”

How to ask for an open relationship
...Sheff often tells people to use something in the media — an article you read or a show you saw — as a jumping off point. Ask your partner what they think about the topic or if they’ve ever heard of it to test the waters, she says.

Be vulnerable, clear, and tenacious—and be able to regulate your feelings, too, if you don’t get the response you expect or want. ...

The whole article (Dec. 12)

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Elisabeth Sheff gets publicity for book The Polyamorists Next Door

I first met sociologist Elisabeth Sheff over dinner at the 2011 Atlanta Poly Weekend. She had recently been denied tenure at Georgia State University. Her specialty for more than a decade was polyfamilies and their children (she's not poly herself), and she had come to a tough and dispiriting decision.

Something that really matters if you're up for tenure is bringing grant money to your university department. Rather than abandon years of work in favor of something that would bring more grants to GSU — meaning research that would pathologize alt-relationships, thereby accessing the grants available for research into pathologies — Sheff decided to leave and try to make her way on her own.

For 20% off the retail price, see footnote 1

The first major fruit of that effort appeared in November: her book The Polyamorists Next Door: Inside Multiple-Partner Relationships and Families.¹ It describes her findings from 15 years of studying polyfamilies and their kids. She's currently on the road to promote the book, giving talks and interviews.

Huffington Post Gay Voices just published an interview with her this morning. Although there is nothing particularly gay about the book or about poly, the gay world seems to be treating polys more and more as fellow travelers in the queer universe.

Additional media appearances, including several podcasts, are listed further below.

Who are 'The Polyamorists Next Door'? Q&A with author Elisabeth Sheff

By Arin Greenwood

...The relationship didn't last. But Sheff's curiosity about polyamory had staying power; she spent some 15 years studying non-monogamous families. The book she wrote based on her research — "The Polyamorists Next Door: Inside Multiple-Partner Relationships and Families" — is a thoroughly interesting, deep look inside this world.

Sex and jealousy, when it's time to open up a family's Google calendar to a new partner, why so many in the poly community are white and affluent — Sheff spoke with HuffPost about all this and more.

The Huffington Post: Is there a typical polyamorous family?

The most common form I found was the open couple, generally a female/male couple that lived together with their children and dated other people who did not live in the household with the couple and their kids. The more people in the relationship, the rarer they are and the more likely it is that the people involved will shift over time....

Poly families’ shared characteristics include a focus on communication and honesty, emotional intimacy with kids and adults fostered through communication and honesty, sexuality kept private among the adults so kids don’t see it even though they can ask about it if they want — and they never want to know, like any other kids, the kids in poly families do not want to know about their parents’ sex lives — dealing with stigma from society and families of origin, challenges deciding to be out or not depending on family circumstances, location and sharing resources so that people get more attention, free time, money, rides, help with homework or life issues, and love.

What makes for a successful poly relationship? How is success defined in poly relationships?

Successful poly relationships are those that meet the participants’ needs. If they continue meeting needs then the relationships continue being successful. If they stop meeting needs because people change or their interests or needs diverge, then it does not have to mean that they failed, only that they are changing form to be something different that meets needs better — at least in the ideal.

Sometimes they crash and burn, hurting people in the process and that is not success. But merely ending or changing form does not mean failure but rather new opportunities to be different....

Some people worry that polyamory is bad for kids. What did you find in your research?

The kids who participated in my research were in amazingly good shape — articulate, self assured, and confident in their family’s love. This positive social outcome was helped along by their parents’ (and their own) race and class privileges because lots of these folks are white, highly educated professionals with middle class jobs, health insurance and white privilege.

On top of those advantages, kids in poly families get a lot of attention from multiple adults who can provide emotional support and practical help on homework or rides home from the movie at the mall.

The downside is that sometimes kids get emotionally attached to a parent’s partners who then leave when things do not work out romantically between the adults. The same thing happens in divorced families in which single parents are dating, and the poly parents use many of the same strategies single parents use, like being very selective, careful and slow about introducing the kids to someone they are dating, and being very clear with the kids about what to expect from the adults in their lives.

The other downsides the kids talked about were too much supervision to get away with anything coupled with the difficulty of keeping a lie coherent with multiple adults, and the problems that come with household crowding....

What are the big rules or guidelines governing sex in the poly community?...

Safer sex agreements mean that fluid transfer is assumed to be taboo unless explicitly negotiated otherwise. Polys routinely use condoms for fluid-producing sex, and have other kinds of sex that does not involve fluid transfer. They also tend to get tested for STIs and share their results in group “show and tell” so everyone knows what everyone else has and sees those people in person to get the sense that they hold the collective health of the group in their hands. This spreads responsibility and empathy.

Polys tend to have more conversations about relationship maintenance than sex, though [when] they do have sex it is often only after extensive communication about feelings, schedules and STIs. All of the discussion and communicating make polyamory a bad choice for people who only want to have no-strings sex....

Most polys try group sex at some point and some of them love it, prefer it to two person sex. More of them tell me that they prefer two person sex and only have group sex occasionally....

...In poly circles, giving someone access to the family’s Google calendar can be considered not only foreplay, but prelude to serious family inclusion....

...How did you do your research? How many people did you talk to, and how did you find them?

I did qualitative research -– what sociologists call ethnography. That involved interviewing 122 people and observing another 500....

There's lots more interesting stuff here. Read on (March 5, 2014).

Commentary on the interview just went up at the San Francisco site sfist.com: Regarding Polyamory, Why Polyamorists Are Mostly White, And How Their Kids Cope, by Jay Barman.

-----------------------------

Sheff has had other publicity since the book came out (not necessarily complete):

● Wisconsin Public Radio did a 22-minute interview just as the book appeared (Nov. 18, 2013).

● On the Sex with Dr. Timaree podcast (to listen, click the button on the speaker bar. Nov. 21, 2013.)

● Interview with the Girl With Pen: Bridging feminist research and popular reality (Dec. 26, 2013).

● On Tristan Taormino's "Sex Out Loud" webradio show: Polyamory, Non-Monogamy, and the Current Reality of Relationships (Jan. 17, 2014).

● On The Sex Geeks podcast: Sexology Spotlight: Polyamorous Families (Feb. 18, 2014).

-----------------------------

Sheff has a blogsite at Psychology Today titled "The Polyamorists Next Door," with much material based on the book. The index page of all her articles there.

On her website are her journal articles and academic book chapters and some presentations.

Some upcoming speaking gigs.

A recent substantial publication: Children of Polyamorous Families: a First Empirical Look, in the Journal of Law and Social Deviance (Vol. 5, 2013. 95 small pages).

Her Polyamorous Family Study Facebook page.

Sheff and her media mentions have appeared in Polyamory in the News often before.

And, here are my posts tagged "kids" for the past three years.

-----------------------------

1. Price discount: The Polyamorists Next Door is published by Rowman & Littlefield. Academic publishers such as this, with their captive markets of students and university libraries, are notorious for high book prices. However, you can get a 20% discount if you order directly and use the promotion code 4M14SHEFF at checkout. "This promotion is valid until December 31, 2014. This offer excludes eBooks, and cannot be combined with any other promo or discount offers."

There's also a lower-cost Kindle edition at Amazon.

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"The surprisingly woman-friendly roots of modern polyamory"

Slate

You remember the Slate article a few weeks ago about why male-dominated polygamy is bad for the societies that host it? Now the same writer is back with the flip side.

Her article gets it right but seems a little breathless, as if she's discovered something new. It may be new to many Slate readers, but the fact that women have supplied most of the modern polyamory movement's leaders, writers, organizers, public spokespeople, and movers-and-shakers since the late 1980s is well known and widely remarked.

I'm struck by how this continues to be true year after year as new leaders, spokespeople, and organizers emerge. I'd say the female-to-male ratio in the movement's key roles may be as high as 3 to 1. (Somebody ought to do a proper study.) And, the men are feminist or feminist-friendly.

This is the biggest difference between polyamory's current "third wave," as sociologist Elisabeth Sheff calls it, and the more male-dominated second wave of the 1960s and 70s, when quite a few women came to feel they were getting the short end of the free-love stick. The women's rebellion against this inside the counterculture came on suddenly around 1969. That in turn had a lot to do with starting the explosive spread of feminism into mainstream society in the early 1970s. But that's another story....

Making Love and Trouble: The surprisingly woman-friendly roots of modern polyamory.

By Libby Copeland

Polyamory does not have the same male-centric history as polygamy.


Recently I wrote about the many problems polygamy tends to cause across the world, including high crime rates resulting from young men confined to singledom because older men are hoarding wives, and the subjugation of teenage girls forced to marry because there simply aren’t enough women to go around....

Historically, though, there’s been an exception to the rule about plural marriage being bad for women. Polyamory, in which people openly take on multiple relationships, sometimes in the context of group marriage, has a radically different history. Nearly as marginal on the left wing of our culture as polygamy is on the right, modern-day polyamory is intertwined with the rise of feminism, and its roots go back to the ’40s — the 1840s....

In the 1970s, during what sociologist Elisabeth Sheff calls the second wave of polyamory, fringe groups around the country experimented with non-monogamy. A San Francisco-based commune called Kerista, founded by a man who called himself Jud the Prophet, consisted of three large group marriages, in which sleeping schedules were rotated regularly to keep intimacy evenly distributed.... Its 1979 handbook mandated egalitarianism and required that members care for the commune’s children in “non-sexist parental roles.”

During the ’90s, the Internet sparked a third wave of polyamory, after AIDS had driven it underground during the ’80s. A Usenet newsgroup called alt.polyamory helped build a community, and a woman calling herself Morning Glory Zell, member of a “neo-Pagan” organization called the Church of All Worlds, helped popularize the term in an article called “A Bouquet of Lovers.” In more recent years, polyamory has mainstreamed somewhat, becoming fodder for features in Newsweek and on ABC’s Nightline. MTV did a True Life documentary on polyamorous young people, books like The Ethical Slut explored the topic, and Dan Savage continues to champion non-monogamy. Polyamory is no longer primarily identified with pagans and prophets.

In the most crunchy, West Coast communities, group marriages and open marriages are common enough that people can talk about being “poly” without having to explain what that is, says Sheff, a Georgia State University professor who is working on a book about polyamory. In her research, Sheff has even come across an area in Seattle populated by large polyamorous families: “You’ve heard of gayborhoods? This is the first poly-neighborhood I’ve heard of.”

Women are in many ways the driving force behind polyamory as a movement these days...

Read on (March 12, 2012).

P.S.: I'm glad to hear that Elisabeth Sheff is writing a book. Though not poly herself, she has been one of the prime academics studying the movement's sociology.

P.P.S.: Here's a history resource from the time between what Sheff calls polyamory's first and second wave: Yonina writes, "I just did a project on polyamorous / non-monogamous discourse and practice in the literary modern period (~1900s to 1930s)." Here's her annotated bibliography with much useful detail.

Update, March 20: An audio interview with the Slate author just went up on New Hampshire's Public Radio's "Word of Mouth" program. Listen here (8:40).

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Poly and Kids. "I've probably observed more modern polyamorous childrearing than anyone on the planet."

Psychology Today blogs

On her blog at the Psychology Today magazine website, Deborah Anapol posts a noteworthy section from her book Polyamory in the 21st Century:

Polyamory and Children

Is polyamory harmful to children?

...As extended families who live together become increasingly rare, especially in the affluent West, polyamorous families are one way that some people are counteracting the isolation of the lone nuclear family and finding ways to provide at-home caretakers for children. Others gravitate toward cohousing or intentional communities that may or may not be monogamously oriented but where adults share some responsibility for child rearing.

Several studies have been done on stepfamilies and children reared communally, but there is still a dearth of research investigating the important question of how polyamory affects children. At the same time, the impact on children is one of the most commonly asked questions whenever the subject of polyamory is raised. Dr. Elisabeth Sheff is an assistant professor of sociology at Georgia State University. She conducted her doctoral research on polyamorous families with children in the mid-1990s and later decided to attempt a longitudinal study of these and other poly families. So far, she's following about thirty families with three or more adults living together who have children between the ages of six and twenty. She'd like to double that and include an ethnically and culturally more diversified group before publishing her findings but says that funding for research on polyamory is scarce.

...As a parent who has raised two children of my own in a variety of nonmonogamous contexts and watched many friends and clients do the same over the years, I have thought deeply about these issues. Over the years, I've socialized with, coached, or spoken at length with at least several hundred other polyamorous families with children and a few dozen middle-aged adults who were raised in families where their parents had open or group marriages or where patriarchal-style polygamy was practiced. While I've made no attempt to "collect data," I've probably observed more modern polyamorous childrearing than anyone on the planet.

...All the recent surveys of polyamorous people find that about half of them are parents. However, at least half of these attempt to hide their extramarital relationships from their children or have teens or adult children whose lives are mainly independent of their parents or utilize polyamorous gatherings, other social occasions, or coaching sessions as a vacation from parenting. As a result, in the course of everyday life, I've had far less opportunity to interact with the children of polys than with their parents, except in the case of personal friends where spending time with the entire family was a natural part of our interactions. Consequently, while I believe my observations can be generalized to a wider population, this may not be the case. It's possible that the children of poly parents I have not met are different from those that I have met.

...Dr. Sheff's sample is also skewed in that virtually all her participants thus far come from the network of people who strongly identify as polyamorous and who attend various polyamorous conferences, potluck dinners, or other social events. Dr. Sheff has found that some polyamorous parents are reluctant to talk to anyone "official" because they are concerned about losing custody of their children. The common perception that children in poly (and nonheterosexual) families are at higher risk for sexual abuse than those in monogamous families, which appears to be completely unfounded according to Dr. Sheff, also makes people nervous about talking to her.

Her focus has been to rely on unstructured interviews to determine what kinds of experiences children in polyamorous families have, what the internal dynamics of the family are, and what kinds of things these families do that help them survive. Further, she's included nonbiological parents, who she says are sometimes more involved in the day-to-day parenting than the biological parents, perhaps because they have more time and inclination for it. Nevertheless, as I spoke with my own contacts and heard what she had found thus far, a cohesive picture began to emerge.

In the absence of existing research on polyamorous families, Dr. Sheff has looked to the research on children of gays and lesbians for clues. There's a fair amount of this research.... The GLBT research has found that essentially all the pressure the children of homosexual parents face is from outside the family. In other words, nothing has been found in the families themselves that's a problem for the children, but they do encounter judgments, prejudice, and negative attitudes from outsiders, such as teachers or neighbors, or are concerned about appearing different. The same appears to be somewhat true for children in polyamorous families, although one bisexual poly parent told me that his teenage son's perception was that polyamory was more acceptable than bisexuality among his peers.

...What's interesting to me is that most of the young adults I know who were raised in child-centered polyamorous families seem to end up giving a higher priority to bonding and sustained intimacy than to freedom, whether they are male or female. While they often attempt both, they seem willing to go for serial monogamy because its continued cultural dominance provides greater ease in intimate connections with partners raised to believe in monogamy. Those who are more determined to pursue radical multipartner lifestyles whatever the cost or who are hungry for sexual variety to make up for a sexually repressed adolescence seem to have a greater need to rebel against the culture norms than the children of the last generation of polyamorous pioneers. This pattern also seems to hold true for the children of more mainstream families who are open with their children about their polyamorous relationships.

As I often joke, if you want your children to be monogamous, practice polyamory!

Read the whole post (March 25, 2011).

I know a number of counterexamples to that last quip, including second-generation adult poly activists today. Healthy poly families certainly produce healthy poly kids at a greater rate than the general population does. Although as Deborah points out, it's awfully hard for a lot of them to find poly-oriented partners while young.

But just as in gay or lesbian families, kids go their own way. Just as most kids of gay parents turn out straight because most people turn out straight, I think a majority of polyfolks' offspring will always tend to choose monogamy in some form because most people do.

If only because the structure is simpler.

As I've pointed out before, in the poly world there seem to be more open marriages than vees, more vees than equilateral triads, more triads than quads, and more quads than quints. The trend seems to be that the more complex the structure, the less commonly it occurs. Extend this trend the other way, and a couple is the least complex structure of all. This suggests to me that even in the fully poly-aware and poly-accepting society we will have 50 or 100 years from now, most relationships will still be pairings most of the time.

--------------------------------

Deborah asked me to mention that she will be putting on several events in the eastern U.S in coming weeks:

-- "Love, Sex, & Freedom," Plainfield, MA; May 19-22.

-- "Sexual Healing for Women," Hartford, CT; May 28.

-- "The Yoga of Love" near Asheville, NC; June 3-5.

For information:
http://www.lovewithoutlimits.com/workshops.html
or write
taj(at)lovewithoutlimits.com

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The state of poly research: Guest interview with Eli Sheff

Today we host a guest post by Dr. Anya Trahan and Liane Ortis. They interviewed sociologist Elisabeth Sheff, author of The Polyamorists Next Door and founder of the PolyResearchers Yahoo group, on how things currently stand with regard to research into polyfolks and their lives.

Take it away, Anya and Liane—

_______________________________________________________

Who are we? We are two emerging poly researchers as well as members of the poly community. We are/were the first two scholars in our respective fields (that we know of) to embark on dissertations that explore the topic of polyamory. In so doing, we not only carefully review(ed) as much as we could from the general media on the poly movement, but we also review(ed) a growing body of research called Polyamory Studies, which usually only professors and academics read — the stuff that doesn’t make it into the mainstream news. Instead of boring you with a list of things you must read to understand the “researchey” side of polyamory (which we can provide upon request) we thought it would be more fun to talk to a prominent expert, one that we both deeply admire, about why some of this research might be interesting to you.

Dr. Elisabeth Sheff researches the diversity of identities and experiences of polyamorous families. She is the foremost academic and legal expert on polyamory in the United States. Among her many other accomplishments, Sheff provided a valuable contribution to the growing body of scholarship on polyamory by coining terms such as polyaffective, which describes emotionally intimate non-sexual relationships between poly people. She is author of The Polyamorists Next Door: Inside Multiple-Partner Relationships and Families, which presents the findings of her groundbreaking 15-year study. Sheff is collecting submissions for a new collection, Stories from the Polycule: Real Life in Polyamorous Families (to be published by Thorntree Press in October). Sheff has given more than 20 radio, print, podcast, and TV interviews with outlets from Radio Slovenia to National Public Radio, the Sunday London Times to the Boston Globe and Newsweek, CNN to National Geographic Television.

We thank Dr. Sheff for joining us and sharing her thoughts. We also welcome any further dialogue sparked by this post!

***

What purpose does academic research serve the poly community?

In general, I think academic research can help make the topic less personal: so polyamory can be shown as a social phenomenon, rather than just a whole bunch of slutty people. It can make things more understandable at a less visceral level. Polyamory is something that I think many people find profoundly threatening. Academic research on polyamory can remove the conversation from such a threatening, emergency feeling and place it in a much more calm and rational type of conversation.

Can you give examples of how published research has benefitted and/or harmed the poly community?

I think published research in general can benefit sexual minorities as a whole, and polyamorous research specifically, in terms of using facts, or evidence-based ideas, to counter hysteria or prejudice. For example, The Polyamorists Next Door has helped a couple different people introduce the concept of polyamory to their Child Protective Services workers.

In terms of harm, I haven't observed that aspect. I think I and others who are doing academic research on polyamory have been vigilant about protecting people's identities, and allowing the participants to choose their own level of out-ness. To my knowledge, no one has ever been accidentally outed in my own research, and I know that a majority of other researchers continually stress the privacy aspect. And, in the United States, as well as in many other places across the world, universities have strict IRB (Institutional Review Board) standards for researchers. IRBs are charged with maintaining the welfare and rights of people involved in research, and polyamory researchers, just like other researchers, must follow those strict standards.

What are the most influential pieces you recommend everyone read, both academic and non-academic?

I think it depends on what people are looking for. If they’re looking for a more theoretical treatment of polyamorous families, I strongly recommend Dr. Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli’s book: Border Sexualities, Border Families In Schools. She does this great update and forward of the Mestiza idea that Gloria E. Anzaldúa came up with about living on the "border."

Also in terms of academic work, it’s hard to go wrong with Meg Barker; she has written both academic and popular press.

In terms of non-academic work, there’s More Than Two by Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert. It’s a much more practical guide to polyamory. So I think that’s a great one in terms of really practical responses.

For another practical book, there’s Kathy Labriola’s The Jealousy Workbook: Exercises and Insights for Managing Open Relationships. She has been in the poly community as well as treating polyamorous folks in relationship counseling for years. I find her book just really well done, non-judgmental, and kind of a realistic way to deal with jealousy.

Do you feel current methods of academic research can adequately represent the variety of experiences and identities within the poly community? How so?

I think current methods can accurately represent the "mainstream polyamory community." I think the sampling techniques (how one gains participants for research), which tend towards internet research and snowball sampling [asking recruits to find other recruits], tend to produce these very white, educated samples of people. I think those procedures lead to a somewhat false homogeneity.

Also, polyamorous people with less privilege (in terms of race, economic status, etc.) are not necessarily being captured by this research. Their voices are not coming forward because they have more to lose from participating.

How important is the popular media (news articles, blogs, podcasts, books for general audiences) to the academic research being done on the poly movement?

It’s actually fairly important in that it brings much greater public awareness to polyamory. So journal editors, who in 2004 had never heard of it, or viewed it as this crazy fringe thing, or questioned why should we talk about this in academia because ‘there are really more important things’, now recognize submissions about polyamory. So I think it makes the research more likely to be taken seriously and get published. Hopefully as polyamory becomes more socially widespread there can be funding for research.

In our own academic fields (Dr. Anya in rhetoric and writing studies; Liane Ortis in higher-ed administration), we were/are the first researchers to take on projects dedicated solely to exploring polyamory in depth. At this time, sociology and psychology seem to be churning out the most research on polyamory. Have you heard of any other fields that have, recently, broached the topic?

Yes. Anthropology — which is a lot like sociology, or sociology is a lot like anthropology. Social psychology — which is so much like sociology and psychology. Geriatrics and life-course aging studies. Family studies. There are certainly some medical studies for looking at the transmission of sexually transmitted infections in consensually non-monogamous relationships versus non-consensually non-monogamous relationships. Also, the legal field is looking at monogamy/non-monogamy, particularly decisions made on hearsay and fear versus facts surrounding families/children.

What is the most pressing work that needs to be done in the future? What’s missing?

I think looking at the long-term effects of polyamorous relationships, in terms of physical and mental health, and financial stability, and [whether] these relationships really foster well-being over the long haul. My hypothesis is that if people get over the hump of figuring out how to deal with multiple partners and can establish a supportive network, folks in multi-partner relationships are actually going to be better off than folks in monogamous relationships because they have a wider support network.

***

...and her forthcoming book cover.

Anya Trahan...

Dr. Anya Trahan is a relationship coach and spiritual counselor. Her book about polyamory, Opening Love: Intentional Relationships and the Evolution of Consciousness, will be published by Changemakers Books in May 2015. Anya's doctoral dissertation is available free online: Relationship Literacy and Polyamory: A Queer Approach. Contact her or learn more at dranya.net.

Liane Ortis

Liane Ortis is a social justice and diversity educator who speaks, develops and delivers workshops, and consults on all areas of identity. Liane’s goal is to assist institutions and individuals with creating more inclusive, accessible, and equitable living and working environments. She is a doctoral student in Higher Education Administration at Bowling Green State University; her dissertation, in progress, is titled, “Identity Meaning-Making Among Polyamorous Students in Postsecondary Educational Contexts: A Constructivist Queer Theory Case Study.” Liane can be reached at liane.ortis@gmail.com or found on Facebook.

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Unicorn Hunting as a Widely Recognized Thing

Posted to a Facebook poly group:

Wish we could find someone near [town], NV, there must be a lady out there somewhere that is looking for a loving couple. I see all the other comments from other couples looking for the same situation let me tell you there is probably more chance of you winning the lottery.

From Michigan:

ANY bi lady AT ALL out there want to start the new year in a new direction with a nice, kind, attractive couple? PLEASE let us know. Don't know ANY other way of finding her....... :(

Craigslist, Sunnyvale CA:

POLYAMORY LESBAMORY Looking for open minded woman to join our relationship/marriage. Must love babys and dogs....

From Ohio, on Reddit:

We are a married couple that I at least feel we are decently attractive. ... We have tried every dating app and site that I can find even several dedicated specifically to the polymarorous lifestyle. I am getting rather discouraged as is my wife who is very eager to explore with another woman. We just want some advice on what we are doing wrong.

An answer to that question, downvoted to oblivion:

The only advice I can give you is patience. My Fianceé and I are keen on triads ourselves and have had moderate success due to two things. Patience and staying away from online poly communities who have a strict enforcement of their interpretation of how non monogamy works.

For some background to better explain, I'm an emotionally detached ex special forces man who is so straight shooting that 65% of people don't like me because quite frankly I don't give a fuck what you think if you did something dumb we need to fix it and that's okay. ...

On Craigslist in Nevada:

We are a very happy stable couple of 12 years.... You have to be willing to participate with both of us...one on one and together and u must be willing to ensue a relationship with us.... female is 33, 5'8 size 10-12....

Kimchi Cuddles, used by permission. Click to embiggen.

 
Newcomers to the poly world, and there are lots of them these days, are often confused or offended by the community's reaction to "unicorn hunters."

A unicorn, of course, is an unattached hot bi woman ready to join a couple and slot into the role they have pre-designed for her — stereotypically that she will love them both equally, have sex only with both of them together so one won't get jealous, have no other relationships, and maybe do housework and childcare. And be dumpable at any moment by both of the couple if one of them gets the wibbles.

Some women who've been around this loop swear never to fall in love with a couple again.

Happy unicorns exist. Some women, and the occasional bi guy, find that being a couple's secondary or friend-with-benefits fits into their life well. But they take care to maintain their independence and autonomy. They tend to be fearless about rooting out unexamined assumptions and spreading them on the table under a bright light for discussion. Such intentional unicorns are on the nice side of a severe supply/demand imbalance, so they can take their pick. And/or have as many couples as they want.


● The wider world is starting to notice the poly unicorn trope and write about it. For instance, in the mainstream Business Insider:

What it means for couples to go 'unicorn hunting' — and why it usually doesn't end well

...Sometimes couples try out polyamory naively, especially when a straight couple wants to find another bi woman to join them. This is called "unicorn hunting," and it's something of a cliché in the poly community.

rawpixel.com / Unsplash

... But it's not as simple as finding a third person you both fancy. In fact, according to Dr. Elisabeth Sheff, expert witness, speaker, and coach of polyamory and author of The Polyamorists Next Door, straight couples often come into the polyamorous community expecting to find a bi woman to join them. This, she said, is called "unicorn hunting."

Sheff's former husband introduced her to the idea of polyamory with exactly this intention. He wanted another woman to sleep with, but he didn't particularly want her to be able to meet other men. Apparently in the poly community, this is quite a cliché.

"She's known as 'the unicorn' because she's so rare, and almost mythical," Sheff told Business Insider. "He thought he was so edgy and out there, and we could have a wife the two of us together.

"As it turns out, it's every straight boy's fantasy. It doesn't fly well in the poly community. And when he didn't get what he wanted, he had a tantrum, and didn't want to do it anymore."

When couples can't find a unicorn, Sheff said it's common that the woman has actually started to quite enjoy the freedom of polyamory. She may have been reluctant to try it at first, but turns out to be the one who enjoys it more.

"The woman of the couple finds other people to socialise with, and the man realises he's not the centre of attention that he [expected to] be, and thinks 'This isn't as much fun as I thought it would be," Sheff said. ...

Remember — everyone has feelings

Alex* is in a polyamorous relationship with his wife. They were monogamous for a long time, but ended up making friends with many polyamorous people, and it turned into quite a normal thing in their social circle.

He told Business Insider he's not aware of a situation where a male-female couple actively seeking a bi woman has worked out well.

..."The stereotype at least is that unicorn hunting couples are looking to treat a partner as an object in their relationship," he added. "They want someone — maybe anyone, reducible to their gender, sexuality, and availability — that fits into their lives and fits their relationship without thinking about the needs and human perspectives of the person they're looking for."...

The whole article (Nov. 29, 2017).

So if you're a well-meaning couple with genuinely big hearts who's looking, what should you do?

Make friends. Lots of them! Lively, thoughtful, socially unconventional friends. Be the kind of friend you want to attract. Seek out your local poly groups, sure, and go to poly cons. But this is not about finding a hole-filler for your marriage. It's about making intimate space for friends who, if cupid's arrows fly, might like to become more.


● Splinter, part of the Gizmodo Media Group of online magazines, goes deeper: Bisexual women don’t want to be your sex ‘unicorn’ (July 19, 2016)

By Lux Alptraum

...Holly’s an open-minded, adventurous sort, interested in exploring all sorts of kinks and adventures, particularly with other people who are as queer as she is. But one thing she’s not interested in? Being the third in a random heterosexual couple’s threesome.

...Despite the fact that Holly explicitly notes that she’s very particular about her group sex experiences, she still gets message after message from couples who clearly haven’t read her dating profile, desperately hoping that they’ve finally found their unicorn.

The term is a familiar one to bisexual women like myself — and it may become known to a wider audience thanks to a new web series called Unicornland, which offers a celebratory vision of what it’s like to be a woman seeking adventure in the arms of couples. The series stars a 28-year-old divorcee named Annie who decides to explore her sexuality and expand her relatively vanilla horizons by dating couples looking for a third.

Alamy

But missing from the show’s premise is a darker truth to the concept of the unicorn. ... As any bisexual woman who’s spent time on a dating app knows, she’s a fantasy come to life, a person willing to show up for a night of excitement and quietly disappear immediately after, a third who’ll ignite a couple’s passions without complicating their emotions. A unicorn is a creature who’ll bring all the sexy fun without creating any drama, baggage, or need for emotional work—and the reason she’s called a unicorn is because, quite frankly, she doesn’t exist.

What does exist, however, are leagues of unicorn hunters: couples on the prowl for the girl of their dreams, the one who’ll bring their fantasies to life without asking anything in return. And though there’s nothing wrong with a couple experimenting with group sex, or using the internet to seek out someone to play with, so many of these couples end up reducing bisexual women to fetish objects, treating us as interchangeable playthings rather than actual human beings. ...

...[The] assumption that being a couple’s third is some sort of special honor shapes the way many threesome seekers approach their would-be unicorns, mapping out elaborate criteria for consideration and often making demands for information and pictures without offering any in return.

...Lost in all of this, of course, is what bisexual women need, or want, or desire. Because while being a tourist in someone else’s relationship can absolutely be a good time, it can also be exhausting, stressful, and emotionally trying. A couple that hasn’t fully prepared for the reality of bringing a third into the bedroom ... is a magnet for drama and disaster, which can easily spill over into the life of an unwitting third. Even if you’re interested in joining a couple for a sexy night of fun, that couple needs to be able to treat you like a person, not a means to an end. Most unicorn hunters don’t seem to have thought enough about their threesome fantasy to realize that.

And there's always been loads about the topic in the poly community itself. What follows is a very partial roundup.

● A deeper, more radical analysis gets to the root on The Mouthy Non-Monogamist's blog: Why couples looking for a third drive polyamorous people stir crazy (Jan. 1, 2018):

Hetero couples seeking another woman to “add to their relationship” represent what happens when people steeped in toxic monogamy culture encounter polyamory. Polyfidelitous triads are seen as a “safe” way to engage in polyamory without having to embrace a full-on rejection of toxic monogamy culture.

...Network polyamory [on the other hand] is inherently feminist. That is, it fully requires that we reject women being property. It also requires that we respect women as autonomous people able to make their own decisions about their sexuality and relationships and to pursue intimacy for its own sake decoupled from the need to form a family and have children.

Polyamorous people reject a whole lot of Western mainstream premises about love, such as:

     – true love exists and that it’s only with one other person
     – relationships’ value is based on their length of time
     – the only way to show commitment is through exclusivity
     – one romantic partner must fill all of your needs
     – jealousy is an acceptable way to show how much you love someone
     – jealousy is a good way to control your partner
     – the only natural outcome of love is marriage and children

...It’s a pretty scary thing, to give up all of these ideas of what love and relationships should be. ... It’s also a radical idea that women can pursue equal and open romantic and sexual relationships with other people. ...

How do closed MFF triads attempt to have their cake and eat it too?

[Among many other ways:] One single home remains the site of family and reproduction, and closed MFF triads just become nuclear families plus one — rather than imagining alternate kinship networks.

I think that newbies in search of closed triads drive many of us polyamorous people crazy because in many ways we’re trying to create an intimacy revolution. Meanwhile others think that they can take a shortcut and not do the mental groundwork to change their assumptions, and still get all of the benefits. For me it’s a wish that these newbies would dream bigger....

● Here's a gentle, respectful, but long piece to give to that sweet new couple who mean so well: So, someone called you a Unicorn Hunter? It's a friendly but thorough explanation of the dog poo they just stepped in.

By David L. Noble

...Common issues when opening a relationship

People can actually be perpetuating unhealthy, dysfunctional standards and practices while being completely unaware that they are part of the problem. If anyone has ever described the idea of societal privilege to you, it’s kinda like that. The core of it is, you can be a good person, doing things that seem reasonable from your perspective, and still be part of a problem. It really does take some education, some communication, and a lot of forethought to get this one right. ...

● And of course there's endless snark, such as Franklin Veaux's Flowchart for Couples Looking for a Third.


● A rather bitter perspective in xoJane: Beware the Unicorn Chasers, and Other Tips I've Learned in 10 Years of Polyamory (Aug. 12, 2015)

By Vae Drennan

...In the polyamory community, there is a common desire, especially from married couples who want to "add some spice," for a third. This third is almost always young, female, slender or fit, conventionally attractive, interested in both members of the couple, and completely new to the world of polyamory, with no compass to guide her. If she's lucky, she'll have other poly friends, but this is usually not the case....

If this sounds like a midlife crisis, you're not far off the mark. Usually, the couple is only interested in their secondary for purposes of their satisfaction. They don't care about what their third wants — or maybe they care, but they don't care enough to provide for her emotional needs or to put her "ahead" of the primary partner even temporarily.

In my first polyamorous relationship, I was the unicorn. My exes loved that they'd finally found a bisexual, thin young goth woman with a high sex drive and a willingness to try about anything. At the time I was still recovering from my first relationship....

● A matching pair of articles by Chelsey Dagger on Polyamory For Us: To Unicorns, From an Ex-Unicorn, and To Unicorn Hunters, From an Ex-Unicorn

There are plenty of women who are excited to do threesomes, or live in a triad, as the partner of both a man and a woman. I should know, I’m one of them! But there’s a difference between wanting to be in a triad and Unicorn Hunting.

The main difference is that Unicorn Hunters tend to look at the third partner as an addition to their relationship, instead of realizing that you’re creating a brand new relationship, with three people instead of two.

● Page Turner, book author and Poly.Land blogger, tells of the time she and her husband were hunted by a unicorn. It went rather well; she tells how.

She's also written a little book, A Geek's Guide to Unicorn Ranching: Advice for Couples Seeking Another Partner (2017). The idea is don't hunt them, attract them. "To attract a unicorn, you’ll have to create a sanctuary. Become unicorn ranchers." If that sounds a bit creepy don't worry, Page is good.


● Lastly, because I'm a word geek: Who invented the term unicorn hunter and when? On Facebook's Polyamory Discussion group, Mike SantaCruz claimed that he was there (posted April 8, 2016):

I'd like to share my recollection of how we came up with the term unicorn hunting. Back in the '90s we had mailing lists like Polylist and Triples, as well as Usenet's alt.polyamory. And like Old Faithful, new members would join and immediately declare that they were a couple looking for a Hot-Bi-Babe. This would become wearisome, and many folks would attack the new members as objectifying their desires.

Then some lists formed a militia that would handle these new members quickly and directly without an all-out war. On one list we called them Wanna-Warriors.

One of these Wanna-Warriors likened their request to seeking out a unicorn, a mythical beast that doesn't exist. And from that, we began to call these couples unicorn hunters.

Calling someone a unicorn hunter was a vast improvement over the derision offered in previous years. It was a rhetorical device that was designed to enlighten the couple instead of chase them away. Some people still feel this is too mean, but when used correctly it does have its intended effect.

Kimchi Cuddles, used by permission. Click to embiggen.

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